The Philosophy of Composition

How exactly does one go about writing a poem? A story? Any work of literature? Inspiration, right? If an idea flashes brilliantly to your mind, then you write it. You sit, you write. It's like Michelangelo's David being found inside the stone. Right?

Not necessaily. You might be surprised; Edgar Allen Poe, for example, wrote a lengthy article title The Philosophy of Composition. Almost everyone who's gone through grade school has read The Raven at least once, and not a few people have seen The Simpson's version of it (who says The Simpsons is trash? Not me!).

Reading it, you think you are peering into the deep recesses of a strange mind, that this could have only come from divine inspiration, that Mr. Poe sat down one day and bled The Raven onto the page. That is what I pictued, at least. But if you stop for a moment and think . . . exactly how much internal rhyme and meter can a person produce on the fly? Clearly, this wasn't all just Mr. Poe sitting under a tree and pulling out his notebook to jot down this poem like some emo teenager (not that there's anything wrong with being an emo teenager . . . ).

And The Philosophy of Composition confirms that. Edgar Allen Poe not only did NOT have divine inspiration, every bit of The Raven was thought out and plotted almost like a manager would create a business plan in this day in age. He quite literally set out to write the best poem ever written. He thought to himself: what is the optimal length? what is the most heart-rending topic? how to keep an audience's attention while maintaining continuity? The answers were: about a hundred lines, the death of a beautiful woman, and a refrain that's meaning changes as it is repeated through the poem. A bit shocking to find that the brilliance was, well, not exactly spontaneous.

So what's the point and purpose of this post? I just wanted to show an example of things that I was talking about in the last post; ideas and good writing are great, but there has to be a plan, an overall thought-process guiding the details. Besides, this is a really interesting read, especially for creative writers. Go ahead, take a look.

I will discuss a little more about the theories in this essay in another post.